After my 11 miler last week, I started to have a sort of weird inkling of pain in my left calf. It didn’t hurt while running, but if I moved my leg in a certain way, a mild pain would shoot up my leg to my hip.

On Tuesday’s run, it didn’t really bother me. This was my first treadmill run of the season, which gave me some shin splints when I started, but they went away, and I felt mostly fine for the rest of the run. Wednesday’s run with East Nasty went really well.

On Saturday, I wasn’t feeling great. My leg felt about the same, but I was coming down with a cold (thanks, Jonathan) and was maybe a little hungover from my birthday party the night before. So I took it slow and didn’t push. Yet when I was done, I was limping.

As Saturday went on, my leg started to feel better and I was able to walk normally again. I went back and forth on if I should rest or do my long run on Sunday. Ultimately I decided to go for it, but just take it easy.

It was the hardest ever.

It felt like 50 pound weights were attached to each leg. I was only doing 2:1 intervals, but it was everything I could do to make it through each 2 minutes of running. While walking I felt fine, but running was absolute torture. I called it quits at three miles and figured it would benefit me more to rest than to push myself through 12 torturous miles and end up in more pain.

So that’s where I am right now. I’m going to take a few days (maybe all the way up till the weekend, we’ll see) and RICE my left leg until it feels better. There’s still several weeks before the half, so I think early intervention will mean that I should still be able to run it.